Scholarship student takes a 3,000-kilometer wrong turn

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Many passengers have ended up in wrong cities, wrong countries and wrong continents

(CNN)It was the opportunity of a lifetime for a young Ghanaian boy -- a scholarship to study medicine in Guyana.

But his journey didn't go quite as expected.

Emmanuel Akomanyi couldn't get a direct flight to Guyana so he boarded a plane in Ghana to Guarulhos International Airport in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

There, he bought a ticket to his final destination in Guyana -- a South American country on the Caribbean coast bordering Surinam, Venezuela and Brazil.

But when he got off the plane, he was not in Guyana -- he was in the city of Goiania, Brazil -- almost 3,000 kilometers away from where he needed to go.

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Akomanyi spent a week in Brazil, supported by strangers as he had no money.

The airline that sold him the original ticket eventually helped him out with a new flight to Guyana's Cheddi Jagan International Airport, near the capital Georgetown.

The latest in a long line of mix-ups

You'd think with all the technology at our disposal, destination mix-ups like what Akomanyi experienced would be a rarity.

Not so.

They're surprisingly common.

In June of 2014, a couple boarded a plane to the southern Caribbean island of Grenada, instead of their desired destination -- the ancient city of Granada, Spain.

U.S. dentist Edward Gamson thought he'd bought tickets from London's Gatwick Airport to Granada, Spain, for himself and his partner via a British Airways booking agent, but only realized he was actually headed to Grenada in the Caribbean once on board, reported The Independent.

The destination country and flight duration hadn't been listed on his e-tickets, which instead displayed only the city name.

"It's just so sad," Gamson told The Independent. "A trip we had been really looking forward to was ruined and ... BA won't do the decent thing."

Gamson claimed the airline refused to reimburse his first-class tickets and didn't reroute the travelers to Granada from Grenada.

He ended up suing British Airways for the cost of the trip, including planned tours in Spain that he and his partner didn't get to take, but the case was reportedly dismissed.

Wrong airport

The airline flew the misdirected passengers to their original destination via another flight, reported local news outlet Thanh Nien News.

In January earlier that year, another Southwest Airlines plane landed at a small airport in Taney County, Missouri, approximately seven miles from where it was meant to land at Branson Airport.

Due to the difference in airport runway lengths -- Taney County airport's runway is 3,738 feet compared with Branson Airport's 7,140 feet -- pilots were forced to brake hard when the plane touched down.

No one was hurt and the airline refunded all tickets and provided future travel credit for passengers.